


Full Circle

by astralis



Category: Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-01
Updated: 2012-05-01
Packaged: 2017-11-16 17:24:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/541973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astralis/pseuds/astralis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Dr Cassandra Fraiser, psychologist, accepts a position with the Atlantis Expedition. No warnings, spoilery for SGA's "Enemy at the Gate" if anyone is unfamiliar with the basic plot of the ep. Written for scrollgirl for Rarewomen 2012, but not uploaded to A03 then.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Full Circle

Her freshman year of college Cassie roomed with a girl who'd lived in seven different countries before she was sixteen. By that point in her life Cassie had learned not to mention Toronto so she said “wow, cool” and asked the appropriate questions about what countries and when and how long.

“Doesn't it get boring? Living in one place for years and years?”

Cassie was unpacking at the time, so she pulled a couple of dresses out of her suitcase and hung them carefully in the tiny closet and then, to make the other girl shut up she turned around and said, carefully and precisely, “I went to Vancouver once. With my mother. Before she died.”

Her roommate said nothing else, and then a year later she dropped out and moved to Australia. Cassie got her degree and went to grad school to become a psychologist because she had nothing better to do, and because for some complex reason it seemed to justify those hours she'd spent with a tutor (or Sam and Daniel) catching up to Earth-born kids. She did well at grad school and then she was good at her job, and just when she'd got herself the perfect apartment in Denver two strangers in USAF uniforms showed up on her doorstep and offered her Atlantis.

She didn't accept right away. Instead, she flew to Minnesota and demanded that Jack tell her why. He was semi-retired, which appeared to mean that he spent his days fishing but kept his security clearance and that people – people who weren't Cassie, even – kept asking him questions.

“Because you're the best,” Jack said, with that patent Jack O'Neill shrug, and offered her beef jerky. She didn't take it.

“Do they think I'm a security risk? Are they worried I might say the wrong thing, so they've decided to pack me off to another galaxy?” (Cassie always lived by the rules about keeping the SGC informed of her whereabouts, and never giving blood, and having all non-emergent medical procedures performed at Stargate Command or the Air Force Academy hospital, and she hated it.)

“Don't be silly, Cass. They think you have a certain unique perspective on life that would benefit the programme.”

“I don't want to benefit the programme.”

“Then don't take the job.”

Cassie left Minnesota entirely unsatisfied and furious at the bureaucracy she couldn't seem to escape, and after three days of pretending not to think about it she signed on the dotted line.

A month later she was standing on a balcony looking down on a blue and grey city, overwhelmed and confused and remembering her freshman roommate, whatever her name was. _I win,_ Cassie thought. _Three planets._

**

Cassie woke early her first morning in Atlantis and felt like she hadn't slept at all. Her bed was harder and narrower than what she was used to, the city seemed to echo with unfamiliar and unexpected noises and she kept remembering, as if she hadn't realized it before, that she was living on another planet in another galaxy, in a city that was actually a spaceship and that had, several years earlier, spent six months floating in the Pacific Ocean just off the coast of San Francisco. Really, by Cassie's standards, that should be classed as normal.

She lay in bed and tossed and turned and watched the numbers on the clock beside her bed tick their way from 3.34 to 4.41 and then, boredom having overwhelmed the expectation that she should somehow make herself go back to sleep, she got up and dressed. She'd arrived yesterday afternoon via the rebuilt Midway station and had been given the guided tour of the more relevant parts of the city; with luck, she might be able to locate an early breakfast and take herself for a walk before her meeting with Dr Keller.

Triumphantly, she made it to the mess hall without getting lost. It was empty but for a few off-duty airmen; she claimed a banana and a muffin and a cup of instant coffee which proved to be so bad as to be undrinkable, and took herself out onto what appeared to be the nearest balcony. Atlantis spread itself out above and around her, a maze of towers and light against the sky.

She stood there in the chill morning air thinking not of her mother or her mom, but of Sam. Cassie had left without telling her goodbye, because everything had happened so quickly and Sam was, rather inconveniently, thousands of light years in the wrong direction at the time. Daniel had said communication with Sam's ship was dodgy at best at that point, so Cassie had written a letter expressing none of the things she wanted to say, and left it with him. It had occurred to Cassie that Sam might not come home, or that she might not: at least, for a change, they were even on that score. It was a weird feeling.

Sam had lived here once. Cassie was just starting grad school at the time; that year she had Thanksgiving with college friends and Christmas with Jack and Teal'c and Daniel, and Vala, who made her nervous. (Vala thought that because Cassie was an alien too, they had to share a particular kinship and for some reason, Vala's attentions made Cassie acutely homesick for her mother.) She barely noticed Sam's absence, and felt guilty every time an email arrived for her, and always found time to reply.

Behind Cassie the door opened, and someone stepped out onto the balcony. “Oh – I'm sorry.”

Cassie turned. It was Teyla, to whom she'd been introduced yesterday. “No, don't be,” she said quickly. All at once the feeling of belonging to Atlantis had vanished, replaced by a ridiculous fear that she was trespassing on someone else's life. “I'll go. I should find my office again, anyway,” she added, having hastily invented a reason for retreating.

“No, really, it is fine, Dr Fraiser.”

There was going to be no graceful escape, so Cassie pushed away the compulsion to flee and turned back to consider the view. “Thank you. I couldn't sleep,” she said. She really needed to stop feeling the need to explain herself; it was probably undignified.

“I know the feeling. Torren – my son – has been up for some time. He has been ill. I have left him with his father, and gone for a walk,” said Teyla, with some passion. Cassie deduced that ill children were wearying.

“Poor Torren,” she said.

“He is much better. He wants chocolate milk, which according to Colonel Sheppard is a cure for all ills.”

Cassie laughed, which she knew had probably been Teyla's intention. “My mother – well, my mom – used to give me ginger ale.” She wondered if Teyla would notice her fumble; if she did, she didn't comment on it.

“Yes, that is Dr Keller's suggestion as well, but Torren prefers chocolate milk.”

“That's probably a good sign.”

“It is.” Teyla paused. “We met only briefly yesterday. I don't believe I had the chance to properly welcome you to Atlantis.”

“That's okay. Everyone else has welcomed me. Several times.”

“They are proud of their city.”

“I don't blame them.” Cassie waved a hand, indicating city and towers and sea and sky. “It's wonderful.” From this vantage point – probably from any the city had to offer – it was hard to believe that Atlantis was actually a spaceship. It felt rather like what she had imagined being on an island would feel like, just with less beaches. “There are so many stories and legends about this place. On Earth, I mean.”

“Your people thought highly of this city. So did mine.”

Cassie looked sideways at Teyla. “I wasn't born on Earth,” she said for the first time.

Teyla nodded, which was, all things considered, a less than satisfactory response to the revelation of Cassie's big secret. It occurred to Cassie that she probably should have chosen someone a little more impressionable, and possibly someone who actually had been born on Earth. “You are the child of whom Colonel Carter often spoke.”

“Not any more,” Cassie said, without thinking. “Not a child, I mean. Though Sam might not have noticed.”

“No,” said Teyla. “Not a child.”

**

Week after week after week went by, and Atlantis started making sense. Cassie's actual daily work was hard, because she had a whole six months actual experience and none of that included mass hallucinations caused by alien fruit (that came her third week in Atlantis). She lay awake at nights agonizing over the things she'd said to her clients and the things she hadn't said, and spent long hours composing emails to her supervisor at the SGC. (That ended when Jennifer, who was Cassie's boss, Cassie's doctor, and Cassie's friend, prescribed sleeping pills - “Just for a couple of weeks, Cass, it's practically standard around here.”)

Atlantis had lost the raw, desperate edge it must have had in its early years, when no one knew whether they would ever see Earth again, and later, when they were coming under almost constant attack from the Wraith and the Replicators. From what Cassie saw Atlantis was less military than she'd expected (armed personnel in the corridors notwithstanding) and more like a cross between a boarding school and a small village. Two months in she found herself leading the book group on Mondays, and on Wednesday evenings she was a regular at the civilian self-defense classes taught jointly by Major Lorne and a mild-mannered scientist named Dr Ram who happened to be an expert in six forms of martial arts. Saturdays were movie nights in the mess hall; she saw more movies in her first six months than she had in five years and often found herself still in the hall at two or three in the morning discussing everything and nothing with an eclectic mix of people, none of whom looked at her like she was crazy when they discovered the gaps in her knowledge of popular culture.

It occurred to her one night, in the middle of an in-depth comparison of Hankan and Athosian traditions, that for the first time in longer than she cared to consider she wasn't keeping any secrets, wasn't lying about how her parents died, wasn't trying to think of a good reason why a single USAF officer would adopt an orphan from Toronto. Maybe, more than anything else, that was why it was easy to be in Atlantis.

**

Six months after she arrived in Atlantis Cassie was sent back to Earth on leave. It was standard procedure, but packing to go home felt like packing to go on an unwanted holiday. She spent hours on her last night on the same balcony she'd spent much of her first, watching the lights of the city sparkle against the water and trying to memorise the unfamiliar constellations in the sky above her.

**

The first time Cassie came through the stargate to Earth she was eleven years old and the only thing she had in the world was two strangers at her side. The second time she was 29. She left her friends in another galaxy and came home to her family and it occurred to her, as Daniel hugged her unreservedly in the gateroom and Teal'c delivered a message from Sam (home next week, love you, let's do dinner) and one from Jack (welcome home, come see me, bring steak), that just maybe she was starting to get it all figured out.


End file.
